In a previous note, readers debated whether empathy was a necessary trait for political leaders. But how necessary is empathy to get through everyday life? One reader believes it’s essential:
Empathy is what allows us to navigate day by day. A human without empathy is a sociopath or a robot. The way empathy is discussed in the video is so flawed by mixing it with altruism, which is very different than empathy but is more closely aligned to the charity model discussed. And do not kid yourself: Altruism is a “what’s in it for me,” while empathy drives connections towards others.
Readers previously debated empathy versus altruism. But is the above reader right? Does not having empathy really make you a sociopath? To get at an answer, a reader flags a Psychology Today piece that details the difference between sociopathy and psychopathy:
Sociopaths tend to be nervous and easily agitated. They are volatile and prone to emotional outbursts, including fits of rage. They are likely to be uneducated and live on the fringes of society, unable to hold down a steady job or stay in one place for very long. It is difficult but not impossible for sociopaths to form attachments with others. Many sociopaths are able to form an attachment to a particular individual or group, although they have no regard for society in general or its rules. [...]
Psychopaths, on the other hand, are unable to form emotional attachments or feel real empathy with others, although they often have disarming or even charming personalities. Psychopaths are very manipulative and can easily gain people’s trust. They learn to mimic emotions, despite their inability to actually feel them, and will appear normal to unsuspecting people.
A race of psychopaths might well be smart enough to invent the principles of solidarity and fairness. (Research suggests that criminal psychopaths are adept at making moral judgments.) The problem with those who are devoid of empathy is that, although they may recognize what’s right, they have no motivation to act upon it. Some spark of fellow-feeling is needed to convert intelligence into action.
But a spark may be all that’s needed. Putting aside the extremes of psychopathy, there is no evidence to suggest that the less empathetic are morally worse than the rest of us. Simon Baron-Cohen observes that some people with autism and Asperger’s syndrome, though typically empathy-deficient, are highly moral, owing to a strong desire to follow rules and insure that they are applied fairly.
Where empathy really does matter is in our personal relationships. Nobody wants to live like Thomas Gradgrind—Charles Dickens’s caricature utilitarian, who treats all interactions, including those with his children, in explicitly economic terms. Empathy is what makes us human; it’s what makes us both subjects and objects of moral concern. Empathy betrays us only when we take it as a moral guide.
Have something to add to the discussion? Say hello@theatlantic.com. Update from a reader, Johan Qin:
Really interesting video. My argument is that empathy is not bad, but can lead to bad long-term decisions (as Bloom argues) if not balanced out with reason and perspective.
My example is a mentally ill person. We should definitely have empathy for those who struggle and suffer. But having only empathy will not assist in helping that mentally ill person become better. Empathy must be balanced out with reason and perspective so we can make a decision about what to do. Empathy makes us care, but logic and compassion (like Bloom argues) results in real change.
Thus, while I think he makes an interesting argument, maybe Bloom should have used a different argument not as complicated and nuanced as the war on Iraq (although nonetheless, his argument on Iraq did make sense to me).
From reader Jim Elliott:
Through my work with people with autism (I was going to make the same point Bloom did about Simon Baron-Cohen’s research), I’ve come to the conclusion that empathy can be too much of a good thing. Some individuals with autism feel too much empathy but lack the wiring needed to turn it off. Sometimes, their sense of fairness is highly solipsistic, and sometimes they are the most generous defenders of others you’re likely to see. Other individuals with autism are, frankly, indistinguishable from sociopaths in their iteration. It is, as they say, a spectrum.
I have come to the belief that politics and corporatism reward high-functioning sociopathy (aka psychopathy). You need empathy to be able to connect to people, to sell yourself and your ideas. But in order to adequately administrate a large system, you need to be able to switch it off. You have to be able to embrace large-scale utilitarianism as required.
Our video team’s short piece highlighting psychologist Paul Bloom’s argument against empathy (embedded above and previously discussed here) has continued to draw responses from around the Web. In a post on Medium, Joe Evans ties the video to philosopher Peter Singer’s two altruist character types:
The warm-glow altruist donates a small amount to a number of organisations with each act of charity providing a small rush, concluding that the donations are simply a self-congratulatory “buzz”, while the effective altruist analyses “what the world needs, how they could use their money to best end and how they could volunteer and act to make things better”. In the video, Bloom implies empathy as the cause of warm-glow altruism and the absence of it as the improvement in behaviour of the effective altruist.
My fellow effective altruists and I are proof that empathy and reason can coexist quite amicably - dare I say, effectively? - in a donor. It is true that empathy leads to warm glow giving, but it is also true that criticizing the empathy of an already charitable person will discourage them from giving at all.
An Atlantic reader sounds off:
Professor Bloom certainly has a provocative premise. I think I’d have to read the entire book to fully understand his arguments, but this video offers some fairly unconvincing examples.
It might be Bloom’s background in cognitive science that’s at work here. Research on emotions, something of a cornerstone in clinical practice, tells a very different story. Warm glow altruism isn’t empathy at all (“look at all the money I’m giving to blind babies!”), but communal narcissism, a way of feeling good about ourselves, puffing up our pride (openly or secretly) by proving ourselves “helpful” or “altruistic.”
The rage that drives us to attack another country isn’t empathy either; it’s rage, a secondary response to more primary vulnerable feelings, like sadness and fear. The attack is a way of avoiding those feelings, not experiencing and expressing them. So it has precious little to do with “empathic engagement.” Much of war is simply fueled by the cycle of violence, a failure to grieve and feel for others (true empathic engagement). One group’s triumph becomes another trauma. And round and round it goes.
The baby in the well is hardly a convincing example of empathy either. We’re compelled by sensationalized stories in the news all the time. I’m not sure the people watching are empathically engaged.
Maybe I’d find the ideas more compelling if the video itself didn’t conflate empathy with all sorts of attempt to dodge it. This is a glaring example of the gap between how clinicians, who work with living breathing human beings over time, understand emotions and how in-the-lab (or in-the-head) researchers tend to view feelings and our attempts to cope with them.
This isn’t an argument against empathy. It’s an argument for it—genuine empathic engagement, something that takes courage to maintain.
Much more reader dissent and discussion here. Bloom encourages those interested to read a 2014 piece he authored for the Boston Review, which includes a discussion of the difference between empathy and compassion:
Putting aside the obvious point that some degree of caring for others is morally right, kindness and altruism are associated with all sorts of positive physical and psychological outcomes, including a boost in both short-term mood and long-term happiness. If you want to get happy, helping others is an excellent way to do so.
It is worth expanding on the difference between empathy and compassion, because some of empathy’s biggest fans are confused on this point and think that the only force that can motivate kindness is empathetic arousal. But this is mistaken. Imagine that the child of a close friend has drowned. A highly empathetic response would be to feel what your friend feels, to experience, as much as you can, the terrible sorrow and pain. In contrast, compassion involves concern and love for your friend, and the desire and motivation to help, but it need not involve mirroring your friend’s anguish.
Read his full argument here. Update from a reader, Kristen Ballinger:
In response to Paul Bloom’s essay, “Is Empathy Actually a Bad Thing?” Obviously it isn’t! His point is that empathy, unbalanced by critical thinking, is ineffective. I would add that critical thinking, unbalanced by concern for others, is dangerous. Moral action requires both.
Martin Luther King, Jr. identified the necessary tension of embodying both qualities in his sermon “A Tough Mind And A Tender Heart.” A few excerpts:
A French philosopher said, “No man is strong unless he bears within his character antitheses strongly marked.” The strong man holds in a living blend strongly marked opposites. Not ordinarily do men achieve this balance of opposites. The idealists are not usually realistic, and the realists are not usually idealistic. The militant are not generally known to be passive, nor the passive to be militant. Seldom are the humble self-assertive, or the self-assertive humble. But life at its best is a creative synthesis of opposites in fruitful harmony. The philosopher Hegel said that truth is found neither in the thesis nor the antithesis, but in an emergent synthesis that reconciles the two.
Jesus recognized the need for blending opposites. He knew that his disciples would face a difficult and hostile world. … He gave them a formula for action, 'Be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.' It is pretty difficult to imagine a single person having, simultaneously, the characteristics of the serpent and the dove, but this is what Jesus expects. We must combine the toughness of the serpent and the softness of the dove, a tough mind and a tender heart.
A third way is open to our quest for freedom, namely nonviolent resistance, which combines tough mindedness and tenderheartedness and avoids the complacency and do-nothingness of the soft minded and the violence and bitterness of the hardhearted. My belief is that this method must guide our action in the present crisis in race relations. Through nonviolent resistance we shall be able to oppose the unjust system and at the same time love the perpetrators of the system. We must work passionately and unrelentingly for full stature as citizens, but may it never be said, my friends, that to gain it we used the inferior methods of falsehood, malice, hate, and violence.
I’m a medical student, and during my first years taking care of patients I’ve been struggling to balance concern for the patient with dispassionate knowledge-based decisions on their care. Recently, I spent some time in the psychiatry wards and learned about Dr. Marsha Linehan’s effective treatment for suicidal patients. It is called “Dialectical Behavior Therapy.” She emphasizes the need for dialectics, or accepting two opposite truths at the same time. I think she and Heigel were getting at the same basic truth about human nature.
Empathy OR critical thinking is a false dichotomy. We need both!
Our video team created a short piece on the work of psychologist Paul Bloom:
A reader weighs in:
Interesting proposition. I only agree partially. Empathy has great value in enabling us to connect to and understand other people. Understanding is a good thing (the alternative is insensitivity, even intolerance). I suggest to the author that the problem does not rest with empathy, but rather with the critical analysis, intent, and decisions made by the empath. To lose sight of optimal outcomes, in order to attain selfish, short-sighted gratification, is always a bad idea. Empathy can be very good; poor choices and decisions are bad.
The New York Times’s John Tierney reported yesterday on Dr. Bloom’s research, asking, “Is empathy an essential virtue for a presidential candidate?”
In his current research, Dr. Bloom and a colleague are finding that the more empathic people feel toward victims of terrorism in the Middle East, the more they favor taking military action.
“If I want to do terrible things to a group, one tried-and-true way is to arouse empathy for victims of that group,” Dr. Bloom said in an interview. “Often the argument for war is rooted in empathy for victims of the enemy.” Dr. Bloom concludes that empathy is overrated as a guide for personal morality or public leadership. “Sob stories are not a good way to make public policy,” he said. “The best leaders have a certain enlightened aloofness.”
Human history is replete with examples of principle-based atrocities. The reasoning underlying genocide and “ethnic cleansing” seems perfectly logical to people who subscribe to a twisted belief system—bring about a “greater good” by “cleansing” the world of “bad” people—but it’s empathetically bankrupt. What drives and sustains the suicide bomber? The belief in the purity of his principles, principles that require one to blind oneself to the suffering and carnage of the innocents at his mercy.
It was the cold light of reason—based of course on false beliefs—that gave us laws permitting slavery, burning human beings at the stake, and bear baiting as a form of entertainment. It was empathy for the victim that ended these practices. It is empathy that prevents a man from beating his wife when the law in some countries fully permits (or even requires) him to do so. It is empathy for the victim that brought us the Red Cross, Amnesty International, and the scores of other humanitarian organizations that grace our world. It is empathy that makes us want to rescue victims, and it is empathy that prevents us from killing their tormenters—despite our rage and lust for retributive justice.
Your thoughts on empathy and politics? Let us know.
